Last Wednesday, February 24, Jorge Lafuente del Cano, member of group of research in Recent History(GIHRE) of the University of Navarra and professor at the University of Valladolid, presented the publication of the Fundación Transición española They called him Trinidad. It compiles the history of the Ministry for Relations with the European Communities, created in 1978 to initiate the Spanish negotiation with the Common Market and which disappeared in 1981 after its integration into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The event took place at the headquarters of the European Institutions in Spain and was chaired by its head of communications, Carlos Martín. In addition to the author, the table was completed by the director of the Fundación Transición, Pablo Zavala, and two former members of the Ministry's work team, protagonists of the story told: Matías Rodríguez Inciarte, Minister of Public Administrations in the government of Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo and current Vice President of Banco Santander; and Carlos Westendorp, Minister of Foreign Affairs in the last government of Felipe González and Ambassador of Spain.

The dialogue revolved around the creation and main challenges of the Ministry, whose headquarters were located in the Trinidad Palace in Madrid, a name that has been used ever since to refer to the negotiating team. Rodríguez Inciarte and Westendorp narrated their arrival and their first steps in the Ministry. Both had as a common thread the figure of Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, the first minister in charge of the negotiation. Calvo-Sotelo set up a small team of work, of an eminently technical nature that could carry out two main functions: firstly, to coordinate and prepare the Spanish administration to begin negotiations with the Community and, secondly, to carry out an extensive pedagogical task throughout the country to explain why Spain wished to join the Common Market, when it was going to do so and what economic and political consequences this historic challenge would entail.

Another of the issues addressed were the serious difficulties that arose in the negotiations and which delayed Spain's entrance until 1986. In a singular way the role of France, which feared the Spanish agricultural skill and put continuous obstacles to the process, emblematically in June 1980 when the President of the Republic, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, was in favor of a pause in the enlargement negotiations until the European Community could solve its internal problems. Among them the famous British rebate, which implied a rethinking of the role of the United Kingdom in the Community, so topical again today.

The event also evoked the unique historical moment in which the life of the Ministry took place, that is, the years of political change in Spain after the death of Franco. It was possible to establish a certain parallelism between a new Ministry, created from scratch, with enormous possibilities, but without useful references in the past to rely on, with the process of transition to democracy, in which great difficulties, challenges, but above all the conviction that the change of regime had to be carried out peacefully and from the political consensus.

Finally, by way of a balance, the members of the round table agreed on the importance for Spain of the start of the negotiations and subsequent accession to the Community. Likewise, the transcendence that, since then, has had the European anchorage of the country, becoming a matter of State that -despite all the circumstances that have been lived since then- nobody questions.